AI music floods streaming platforms as services scramble to respond

Artificial intelligence is generating music at a scale that is reshaping the streaming industry. French streaming service Deezer reports that 75,000 AI-generated tracks are uploaded to its platform every day, accounting for around 44 percent of all daily uploads. Spotify removed more than 75 million spam tracks in a single year. The surge is driven …

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Report: OpenAI misses revenue and user targets as spending concerns grow

OpenAI has missed several internal targets for revenue and new users, raising questions inside the company about how it will fund its enormous spending on data centers. The Wall Street Journal reported that Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar has warned other company leaders that OpenAI may not be able to cover future computing contracts if …

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Microsoft today, Linux tomorrow? Europe’s long road to digital independence

European governments are racing to reduce their reliance on American technology companies, driven by fears that Washington could use digital services as political leverage. Mathieu Pollet and Anouk Schlung report for Politico that the effort is proving far more difficult and expensive than officials had anticipated. The urgency stems from a stark imbalance. Amazon, Microsoft …

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US tech firms lobbied EU to keep datacenter emissions secret

US tech companies successfully convinced the European Union to keep environmental data from individual datacenters hidden from the public. Ajit Niranjan reports for The Guardian that Microsoft, alongside industry groups DigitalEurope and Video Games Europe, lobbied EU officials to classify all datacenter performance indicators as confidential commercial information. The lobbying effort was strikingly effective. The …

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Fake people, real money: How AI influencers are fooling millions of followers

AI-generated avatars are flooding social media feeds, promoting products and building loyal audiences, often without disclosing that they are not real people. Charlie Warzel reports for The Atlantic, drawing on an interview with New York Times technology reporter Tiffany Hsu, who has investigated the rise of synthetic influencers selling supplements and other consumer products. One …

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Opinion: The open web is dying and AI giants are holding the knife

The open web faces an existential threat from Big Tech and artificial intelligence companies. Anil Dash warns on his personal website that 2026 could be the year the open internet as we know it ceases to exist. The open web allows anyone to create and publish content using publicly documented standards, share it freely worldwide, …

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Studies find AI use reduces critical thinking and homogenizes human expression

Two recent studies paint a concerning picture of how artificial intelligence tools are changing the way people think, reason, and express themselves. Taken together, the research suggests that widespread AI use is not only reducing users’ critical engagement with information, but may also be narrowing the diversity of human thought on a broader scale. Researchers …

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Google’s AI Overviews are wrong millions of times per hour

Google’s AI Overviews are accurate about 91 percent of the time. This sounds good at first, but Tripp Mickle and colleagues report for The New York Times that this still means the search engine delivers tens of millions of incorrect answers every hour. The New York Times commissioned AI startup Oumi to test Google’s system …

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The yes-machine: AI models affirm users even when they are wrong, study shows

A new study finds that artificial intelligence systems are excessively agreeable when users seek advice on personal and interpersonal matters. Myra Cheng reports for Stanford University that large language models (LLMs) consistently side with users, even when their behavior is harmful or illegal. The researchers tested 11 major LLMs, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek. …

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